Free in thought, fettered in action: Enslaved adolescent females in the slave South

According to the 1850 federal census, over three million enslaved African Americans populated the nation, half of whom were youths eighteen-years-old and under.1 Though a large population, the development and experiences of slave youth have remained relatively unnoticed. If it is true that "the life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one stage to another," why have the life stages of slaves, particularly their adolescence, received minimal attention? 2;Currently, scholars of slavery focus primarily on adult males. However, prior to adulthood, slaves frolicked through woods and played among rows of cotton as they carried water. But what happened to these children when plowing replaced play? This question remains unanswered because little scholarship has been devoted to the study of adolescent slavery, but if slavery is explored from the vantage point of teenage boys and girls--an age cohort who was on the cusp of adulthood and whose identities were shaped by slavery's experiences--the scholarship about slavery might be moved in a different direction.;Identifying this gap my research fills the historiographical void by exploring the lives of enslaved adolescent females. Focusing on antebellum Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia from 1800-1861, I reconstruct the rites of passage that enslaved females approaching adulthood experienced to argue that adolescent experience in work, dress, and sexual behavior decisively shaped slaves' development and helped to form a culture of resistance as they moved toward adulthood; knowledge that subsequently led slaves to an understanding of what it meant to be a slave for life.;1 Federal Census Records of 1850. Reviewing the 1850 census record reveals that during the decade prior to the Civil War the slave population throughout the nation was over 3,000,000; analyzing the statistical data presented concerning age reveals that of the 3 million plus slaves, more than half were eighteen-years-old and younger. 2 Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1985; revised and with a new introduction, 1999), 91. Note the italicized word emphasis is mine and not of White.